Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • the extreme wrong we congratulate ourselves for not being

    Digital polarization is not simply the process whereby views tend toward extremes, but that which sorts us against our better judgment to commit to a stance of binary opposition. In other words, the process by which politics is hollowed out into opinionating and by which it converges with consumption and entertainment. “Hitler” is the extreme…

  • a paradoxical solace that follows from the realization that we are fucked

    I’m a bit all over the place as regards my information channel management*, so I can’t credit whoever it was that caused me to see this long review-essay at the European Review of Books… but I can tell you that the challenge was less finding a piece of it to pull-quote, and more deciding which…

  • the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth

    Apparently it was Gilles Deleuze’s birthday yesterday, so big thanks for BIG OTHER coughing up a selection of quotes by the man himself, among which this one was the one that I really needed to read today: Creation takes place in bottlenecks…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is…

  • like a shadow anticipating its own body

    From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…

  • not merely window-dressing

    Adam Tooze, an aside in an account of the unfolding Ghanian debt crisis: Narratives are not merely window-dressing. They matter, because they fuel optimism and sustain belief, which infuses the assessment of analysts and credit rating agencies. Narratives are amongst the tools with which capital allocators manage the uncertainty inherent in any investment, but which…